Chapter XIV: Preface (12)

And while he is kneeling there, in bursts the young man, who has returned to say that his aunt declines to meet him. He is startled to see the lady to whom he had vainly offered his heart four years ago, and rushes to the conclusion that he too has been entrapped for some purpose. The fifth section of the poem opens with a scornful denunciation of the trick which he considers stands confessed in the scene which he beholds. "O you two base ones, male and female! Sir!" he exclaims; "half an hour ago I held your master for my best of friends, and four years since you seemed my heart's one love!" The woman explains to him that she has been sent for simply to counsel his cousin on the question of her proposed marriage. She finds him innocent save in folly, and will so report. The elder man she bids to leave the youth, and leave unsullied the heart she rescues and would lay beside another's. While she speaks the devil is tempting him to one more crime. He will turn affairs to his own advantage. He writes some lines in the album before him, closes the book, hands it to the indignant woman, and begs her to leave him alone with his friend while he discusses the situation. In the book which she receives he has written a note to her telling her that her young lover is still faithful to her, and threatening her that if she does not receive him on familiar terms the story of her past shame shall be exposed to her husband. Left alone with the young man, he opens out a scheme of infernal ingenuity, whereby at once he will pay his gambling debt and avenge himself for the contempt and scorn with which his unhappy victim has once more received the offer of his affection. He proposes to barter the woman who has unwittingly put herself into his power--to compel her to yield herself up to the man in exchange for the ten thousand pounds he cannot otherwise pay. He explains to him that she has deluded her parson husband--would have yielded to himself had he not determined to substitute his friend. "Make love to her; pick no phrase; prevent all misconception: there's the fruit to pluck or let alone at pleasure!" He leaves the room, and in superb composure the intended victim enters. Captive of wickedness, she warns him: "Back, in God's name!" "Sin no more!" she cries: "I am past sin now." She implores him to break the fetters which have bound him to the evil influence which has destroyed her life. Her noble bearing under the terrible circumstances assures him of her innocence of any complicity in a trick. He tells her the man has told heaps of lies about her, which he had not believed. Blushing and stumbling in his speech, he contrives to let her know the use that was to be made of her. Not knowing if there were truth in what was told him of her marriage, he offers her his hand if she is free to accept it,--any way, to take him as her friend. She gives him her hand. At that moment the adversary returns. "You accept him?" he asks. "Till death us do part!" she answers. "But before death parts, read here the marriage licence which makes us one." He then displays the awful words addressed to her in the fatal page she holds in her hand. She reads, and when she comes to the last line--

"Consent--you stop my mouth, the only way"--

turning to the young man, she pitifully asks, "How could mortal 'stop it'?" "So!" he cries. "A tiger-flash, and death's out and on him!" In the closing scene the wretched, hunted woman dies. She has secured her vindicator's acquittal on the charge of murder by writing in the album that he has saved her from the villain, righteously slain, who would have outraged her. As she dies the young girl who was to have married the defender of the dead woman appears on the scene, and the tragedy closes. In _Notes and Queries_ for March 25th, 1876, Dr. F. J. Furnivall thus mentions the incidents on which the poem is based: "The story told by Mr. Browning in this poem is, in its main outlines, a real one--that of Lord De Ros, once a friend of the great Duke of Wellington, and about whom there is much in the _Greville Memoirs_. The original story was, of course, too repulsive to be adhered to in all its details--of, first, the gambling lord producing the portrait of the lady he had seduced and abandoned, and offering his expected dupe, but real beater, an introduction to the lady as a bribe to induce him to wait for payment of the money he had won; secondly, the eager acceptance of the bribe by the younger gambler, and the suicide of the lady from horror at the base proposal of her old seducer. The story made a great sensation in London over thirty years ago. Readers of _The Inn Album_ know how grandly Mr. Browning has lifted the base young gambler, through the renewal of that old love, which the poet has invented, into one of the most pathetic creations of modern time, and has spared the base old _roué_ the degradation of the attempt to sell the love which was once his delight, and which, in the poem, he seeks to regain, with feelings one must hope are real, as the most prized possession of his life. As to the lady, the poet has covered her with no false glory or claim on our sympathy. From the first she was a law unto herself; she gratified her own impulses, and she reaped the fruit of this. Her seducer has made his confession of his punishment, and has attributed, instead of misery, comfort and ease to her. She has to tell him, and the young man who has given her his whole heart, that the supposed comfort and ease have been to her simply hell; and tell, too, why she cannot accept the true love that, under other conditions, would have been her way back to heaven and life. What, then, can be her end? No higher power has she ever sought. Self-contained, she has sinned and suffered. She can do no more. By her own hand she ends her life; and the curtain falls on the most profoundly touching and most powerful poem of modern times." The young girl of the poem is the invention of the poet; the other characters took part in the actual tragedy. In his _Memoirs_, first series, Greville mentions Lord De Ros from time to time, and they travelled together in Italy. Under date of "Newmarket, March 29th, 1839," Greville makes the following entry in the first volume of the second series of his _Memoirs_, concerning the death of his friend: "Poor De Ros expired last night soon after twelve, after a confinement of two or three months from the time he returned to England. His end was enviably tranquil, and he bore his protracted sufferings with astonishing fortitude and composure. Nothing ruffled his temper or disturbed his serenity. His faculties were unclouded, his memory retentive, his perceptions clear to the last; no murmur of impatience ever escaped him, no querulous word, no ebullition of anger or peevishness; he was uniformly patient, mild, indulgent, deeply sensible of kindness and attention, exacting nothing, considerate of others and apparently regardless of self, overflowing with affection and kindness of manner and language to all around him, and exerting all his moral and intellectual energies with a spirit and resolution that never flagged till within a few hours of his dissolution, when nature gave way, and he sank into a tranquil unconsciousness, in which life gently ebbed away. Whatever may have been the error of his life, he closed the scene with a philosophical dignity not unworthy of a sage, and with a serenity and sweetness of disposition of which Christianity itself could afford no more shining or delightful example. In him I have lost, 'half lost before,' the last and greatest of the friends of my youth; and I am left a more solitary and a sadder man."

=Instans Tyrannus= == The Threatening Tyrant. (_Men and Women_, 1855; _Dramatic Romances_, 1868.) The title of this poem was suggested by Horace's Ode on the Just Man (_Od._ iii. 3. 1):--

"Justum et tenacem propositi virum,
Non civium ardor prava jubentium,
Non vultus instantis tyranni," etc.

('The just man, firm to his purpose, is not to be shaken from his fixed resolve by the fury of a mob laying upon him their impious behests, nor by the frown of a threatening tyrant, etc.') These lines are said to have been repeated by the celebrated De Witte while he was subject to torture. When men or causes are suppressed by tyranny, the tyrant knows well in his heart that force alone, and not justice, enables him to crush opposition to his will; and he is the first to see, even if he do not acknowledge, the Divine Arm thrust forth from the heavens to protect his victims and avenge their wrongs. From some undefined cause a poor, contemptible man was the object of a tyrant's hate: he struck him, tried to bribe him, tempted his blood and his flesh. Having tried every way to extinguish the man, he contrived thunder above and mine below him to destroy, as a rat in a hole, this friendless wretch, when suddenly the man saw God's arm across the sky. The man

--"caught at God's skirts, and prayed!
So, _I_ was afraid!"

[Archdeacon Farrar refers the incidents of this poem to the persecution of the early Christians.--_Browning Society Papers_, Pt VII., p. 22*.]

=In Three Days.= (_Men and Women_, 1855; _Dramatic Lyrics_, 1868.) A lover anticipates that in three days he shall see his lady. He is aware that three days may change his future, as has often been changed the history of the world in the time. He knows, too, that though three days may cast no shadow in his way, still the years to follow may bring changes and chances of unimagined end. He reiterates that in three days he shall see her, and fear of all that the future may have in store is absorbed in the blissful anticipation.

=Italian in England, The.= (_Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_, in _Bells and Pomegranates_, No. VII., 1845.) The incident is not historical, though something of the kind might well have happened to any of the Italian patriots in their revolt against the Austrian domination. A prominent Italian patriot is hiding from the Austrian oppressors of his country after an unsuccessful rising. He has taken refuge in England, and the poem tells how the Austrians pursued him everywhere, and how he would have been taken if a peasant girl, to whom he confessed his identity, had not preferred humanity and the love of her country to the gold she might have earned by delivering him to his pursuers. [Mazzini must have gone through many such experiences, and the poem was one which he very highly appreciated.] Hunted by the Austrian bloodhounds, hiding in an old aqueduct, up to the neck in ferns for three days, the pangs of hunger induced him to attract the attention of a peasant girl going to her work with her companions: he threw his glove, to strike her as she passed. Without giving any sign that could acquaint her friends with her object, she glanced round and saw him beckon; breaking a branch from a tree, so as to recognise the spot, she picked up the glove and rejoined her party. In an hour she returned alone. He had not intended to confide in the woman, but her noble face led him to confess he was the man on whose head a great price was set. He felt sure he would not be betrayed. He bade her bring paper, pen and ink, and carry his letter to Padua, to the cathedral; then proceed to a certain confessional which he mentions, and whisper his password. If it was answered in the terms he named, then she was to give the letter to the priest. She promised to do as he desired. In three days more she appeared again at his hiding-place. She told him she had a lover who could do much to aid him. She brought him drink and food. In four days the scouts gave up the search, and went in another direction. At last help arrived from his friends at Padua. He kissed the maiden's hand, and laid his own in blessing on her head. When he took the boat from the seashore, on the night of his escape, she followed him to the vessel. He left, and never saw her more. And now that he is safe in England, he reflects that it is long since he had a thought for aught but Italy. Those whom he had trusted, those to whom he had looked for help, had made terms with the oppressors of his country; his presence in his own land would be awkward for his brethren. But there is one "in that dear, lost land" whose calm smile he would like to see; he would like to know of her future, her children's ages and their names, to kiss once more the hand that saved him, and once again to lay his own in blessing on her head, and go his way. "But to business!"

NOTES.--_Metternich_: the great Austrian diplomatist, and enemy of Italian independence. _Charles_: Carlo Alberto, King of Sardinia. He resorted to severe measures against the party known as "Young Italy," founded by Mazzini. He died in 1849. _Duomo_, the cathedral. _Tenebræ_ == darkness: the office of matins and lauds, for the three last days in Holy Week. Fifteen lighted candles are placed on a triangular stand, and at the conclusion of each psalm one is put out, till a single candle is left at the top of the triangle. The extinction of the other candles is said to figure the growing darkness of the world at the time of the Crucifixion. The last candle (which is not extinguished, but hidden behind the altar for a few moments) represents Christ over whom Death could not prevail.

=Ivàn Ivànovitch.= (_Dramatic Idyls_, First Series, 1879.) Ivàn Ivànovitch, or John Jackson, as his name would be in English, was skilled in the use of the axe, as the Russian workman is. Employed one day in his yard, in the village where he lived, suddenly over the snow-covered landscape came a burst of sledge bells, the sound of horse's hoofs galloping; then a sledge appeared drawn by a horse, which fell down as it reached the place. What seemed a frozen corpse lay in the vehicle: it was Dmitri's wife, without Dmitri and the children, who left the village a month ago. They restore the woman, who utters a loud and long scream, followed by sobs and gasps, as, with returning life, she takes in the fact that she is safe. "But yesterday!" she cries. "Oh, God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, cannot You bring again my blessed yesterday? I had a child on either knee, and, dearer than the two, a babe close to my heart. Intercede, sweet Mother, with thy Son Almighty--undo all done last night!" Then she reminds them how, a month ago, she and her children had accompanied her husband, who had gone to work at a church many a league away: five of them in that sledge--Ivàn, herself, and three children. The work finished, they were about to return, when the village caught fire. Then Ivàn hurried his family into the sledge, and bade them hasten home while he remained to combat the flames. He bade them wrap round them every rug, and leave Droug, the old horse, to find his way home. They start; soon the night comes on; the moon rises. They pass a pine forest: a noise startles the horse--his ears go back, he snuffs, snorts, then plunges madly. Pad, pad, behind them are the wolves in pursuit--an army of them; every pine tree they pass adds a fiend to the pack; the eldest lead the way, their eyes green-glowing brass. The horse does his best; but the first of the band--that Satan-face--draws so near, his white teeth gleam, he is on the sledge--"perhaps her hands relaxed her grasp of her boy," she says; "for he was gone." The cursed crew fight for their share; they are too busy to pursue. She urges the horse to increased exertion. Alas! the pack is after them again; "Satan-face" is first, as before, and ravening for more. The mother fights with the monster, but the next boy is gone--plucked from the arms she clasped round him for protection. Another respite, while the fiends dispute for their share; but, as they fly over the snow, the leader of the pack tells his companions that their food is escaping; he leaves them to pick the bones, and--pad, pad!--is after the sledge again. All fight's in vain: the green brass points, the dread fiend's eyes, pierce to the woman's brain--she falls on her back in the sledge; but, wedging in and in, past her neck, her breasts, her heart, Satan-face is away with her last, her baby boy. She remembered no more. And now she is at home--childless, but with her life. And Ivàn the woodsman sternly looks; the woman kneels. Solemnly he raises his axe, and one blow falls--headless she kneels on still--

"It had to be.
I could no other: God it was bade 'Act for Me!'"

He wipes his axe on a strip of bark, and returns silently to his work. The Jews, the gipsies, the whole crew, seethe and simmer, but say no word. Then comes the village priest, and with him the commune's head, Stàrosta, wielder of life and death; they survey the corpse, they hear the story. The priest proclaimed

"Ivàn Ivànovitch God's servant!"

"Amen!" murmured the crowd, and "left acquittal plain adjudged." They told Ivàn he was free. "How otherwise?" he asked.

NOTES.--_Ivàn Ivànovitch_ is "an imaginary personage, who is the embodiment of the peculiarities of the Russian people, in the same way as _John Bull_ represents the English and _Johnny Crapaud_ the French character. He is described as a lazy, good-natured person." (_Webster's Dict._) _A verst_ is equal to about two-thirds of an English mile. _Droug_: the horse's name means friend, and is pronounced "drook." _Pope_ should not be spelled with a capital; it is merely the Russian term for priest--_papa_, father. _Pomeschìk_ means a landed proprietor. _Stàrosta_, the old man of the village, the overseer.

This is a variant of a Russian wolf-story which, in one form or another, we all heard in our childhood. The poet visited Russia in the course of his great tour in Europe in 1833, and he has told the familiar tale of the unhappy mother who saved her own life by throwing one after another of her children to the pursuing wolves, with all the local colouring and fidelity to the facts to which we are accustomed in the poet's work. Not merely as a tale dramatically told are we to consider the poem; but--as might be expected--we must look upon it as a problem in mental pathology. The superficial observer, looking upon the mere facts, and not troubling very much about the psychology of the case, will at once condemn the unhappy mother, and execute her as promptly in his own mind as did Ivàn Ivànovitch with his axe. But rough and ready judgments, however necessary in the conduct of our daily life, are frequently unsound; and the voice of the people is about the last voice that should be listened to in such a case as this. If a man who is usually considered a sane and decent member of society suddenly does some abnormal and outrageous thing, we at once ask ourselves, "Is he mad?" If a mother, any mother, suddenly violates the maternal instinct in a flagrant manner, we immediately suspect her of mental derangement. The maternal instinct is the strongest thing in nature; the ties which bind a woman to her offspring are stronger, in the ordinary healthy mother, than the ties which bind a man to decent and ordinary observance of the laws of society. Old Bailey judgments are not to be employed in such a case as this; it is one for a specialist. And we apprehend there is not a competent authority in brain troubles living who would not acquit Louscha on the ground of insanity.

=Ixion.= (_Jocoseria_, 1883.) Ixion, in Greek mythology, was the son of Phlegyas and king of the Lapithæ. He married Dia, daughter of Deioneus, and promised to make his father-in-law certain bridal presents. To avoid the fulfilment of his promise, he invited him to a banquet, and when Deioneus came to the feast he cruelly murdered him. No one would purify him for the murder, and he was consequently shunned by all mankind. Zeus, however, took pity on him, and took him up to heaven and there purified him. At the table of the gods he fell in love with Hera (Juno), and afterwards attempted to seduce her. Ixion was banished from heaven, and by the command of Zeus was tied by Mercury to a wheel which perpetually revolved in the air. Ixion, condemned to eternal punishment, is in the poem described as defying Zeus after the manner of Prometheus. It is impossible to doubt that Mr. Browning intends to represent the popular idea of God and his own attitude towards the doctrine of eternal punishment. It is, however, only the caricature of God created by popular misconception at which the poet aims, whatever may have to be said of his opinions concerning eschatology. As Caliban thought there was a _Quiet_ above Setebos, so Ixion appeals to the Potency over Zeus. The truth is intended that both unsophisticated man in the savage state and the highest type of cultured man agree in their theological beliefs so far as to acknowledge a Supreme Being of a higher character than the anthropomorphic God of popular worship. Of course both Caliban and Ixion talk Browningese. Ixion is represented as comparing himself with his torturer:--

"Behold us!
Here the revenge of a God, there the amends of a Man"--

a man with bodily powers constantly renewed, to enable him to suffer. Above the torment is a rainbow of hope, built of the vapour, pain-wrung, which the light of heaven, in passing tinges with the colour of hope. Endowed with bodily powers intended to be God's ministers, Ixion has been betrayed by them. But he was but man foiled by sense; he has endured enough suffering to teach him his error and his folly. "Why make the agony perpetual?" "To punish thee," Zeus may reply. Ixion says he once was king of Thessaly: he had to punish crime. Had he been able to read the hearts of the criminals whom he sent to their doom, and had plainly seen repentance there, would he not have given them

"Life to retraverse the past, light to retrieve the misdeed?"

Zeus made man, with flaw or faultless: it was his work. Ixion had been admitted, all human as he was, to the company of the gods as their equal. He had faith in the good faith and the love of Zeus, and for acting upon it was cast from Olympus to Erebus. Man conceived Zeus as possessing his own virtues: he trusted, loved him because Zeus aspired to be equal in goodness to man. Ixion defies him, tells him he apes the man who made him; it is Zeus who is hollowness. The iris, born of Ixion's tears, sweat and blood, bursting to vapour above, arching his torment, glorifies his pain; and man, even from hell's triumph, may look up and rejoice. He rises from the wreck, past Zeus to the Potency above him--

"Thither I rise, whilst thou--Zeus, keep the godship and sink!"

The Zeus of the poem bears no relation whatever to the Christian's God. The Potency over all is the All-Father, the God of Love, who yet, in Infinite Love, may punish rebellious man, who conceivably may reject His love, may never feel a touch of the repentance which Ixion declared he felt, who suffering and still sinning, hating and still rebelling, may conceivably be left to the consequences of the rebellion which knows no cessation, as the suffering no respite.

NOTES.--_Sisuphos_, "the crafty": son of Æolus, punished in the other world by being forced for ever to keep on rolling a block of stone to the top of a steep hill, only to see it roll again to the valley, and to start the toilsome task again. _Tantalos_, a wealthy king of Sipylus in Phrygia. He was a favourite of the gods, and allowed to share their meals; but he insulted them, and was thrown into Tartarus. He suffered from hunger and thirst, immersed in water up to the chin; when he opened his mouth the water dried up and the fruits suspended before him vanished into the air. _Heré_, in Greek mythology the same as Juno, queen of heaven and wife of Zeus or Jupiter. _Thessaly_, a country of Greece, bounded on the south by the southern parts of Greece, on the east by the Ægean, on the north by Macedonia and Mygdonia, and on the west by Illyricum and Epirus. _Olumpos_, a mountain in Thessaly. On the highest peak is the throne of Zeus, and it is there that he summons the assemblies of the gods. _Erebos_, in Greek mythology "the primeval darkness." The word is usually applied to the lower regions, filled with impenetrable darkness. _Tartaros-doomed_ == hell-doomed.

=Jacopo= (_Luria_) was the faithful secretary of the Moorish mercenary who led the army of Florence.

=Jacynth.= (_Flight of the Duchess._) The maid of the Duchess, who went to sleep while the gipsy woman held the interview with her mistress, and induced her to leave her husband's home.

=James Lee's Wife.= (_Dramatis Personæ_, 1864; originally entitled _James Lee_.) This is a story of an unfortunate marriage, told in a series of meditations by the wife. Mr. Symons describes the psychological processes detailed in the poem as "the development of disillusion, change, alienation, severance and parting." The key-notes of the nine divisions of the work are: I. Anxiety; II. Apprehension; III. Expostulation; IV. Despair; V. Reflection; VI. Change; VII. Self-denial; VIII. Resignation; IX. Self-Sacrifice.

I. AT THE WINDOW.--The wife reflects that summer has departed. The chill, which settles upon the earth as the sun's warm rays are withheld, falls heavily on her heart. Her husband has been absent but a day, and as she thinks of the changing year, she asks, with apprehension, "Will he change too?"

II. BY THE FIRESIDE.--He has returned, but not the sun to her heart. As they sit by the fire in their seaside home, she reflects that the fire is built of "shipwreck wood." Are her hopes to be shipwrecked too? Sailors on the stormy waters may envy their security as they behold the ruddy light from their fire over the sea, and "gnash their teeth for hate" as they reflect on their warm safe home; but ships rot and rust and get worm-eaten in port, as well as break up on rocks. She wonders who lived in that home before them. Did a woman watch the man with whom she began a happy voyage--see the planks start, and hell yawn beneath her?

III. IN THE DOORWAY.--The steps of coming winter hasten; the trees are bare; soon the swallows will forsake them. The wind, with its infinite wail, sings the dirge of the departed summer. Her heart shrivels, her spirit shrinks; yet, as she stands in the doorway, she reflects that they have every material comfort. They have neither cold nor want to fear in any shape, only the heart-chill, only the soul-hunger for the love that is gone. God meant that love should warm the human heart when material things without were cold and drear. She will

"live and love worthily, bear and be bold."

IV. ALONG THE BEACH.--The storm has burst; it is no longer misgiving, fear, apprehension: it is certainty. She meditates, as she watches him, that he wanted her love; she gave him all her heart He has it still: she had taken him "for a world and more." For love turns dull earth to the glow of God. She had taken the weak earth with many weeds, but with "a little good grain too." She had watched for flowers and longed for harvest, but all was dead earth still, and the glow of God had never transfigured his soul to her. But she did love, did watch, did wait and weary and wear, was fault in his eyes. Her love had become irksome to him.

V. ON THE CLIFF.--It is summer, and she is leaning on the dead burnt turf, looking at a rock left dry by the retiring waters. The deadness of the one and the barrenness of the other suit her melancholy; they are symbols of her position, and as she muses, a gay, blithe grasshopper springs on the turf, and a wonderful blue-and-red butterfly settles on the rock. So love settles on minds dead and bare; so love brightens all! So could her love brighten even his dead soul.

VI. READING A BOOK, UNDER THE CLIFF.--She is reading the poetry of "some young man" (Mr. Browning himself, who published these "Lines to the Wind" when twenty-six years old). The poet asks if the ailing wind is a dumb winged thing, entrusting its cause to him; and as she reads on she grows angry at the young man's inexperience of the mystery of life. He knows nothing of the meaning of the moaning wind: it is not suffering, not distress; it is change. That is what the wind is trying to say, and trying above all to teach: we are to

"Rejoice that man is hurled
From change to change unceasingly,
His soul's wings never furled!"

"Nothing endures," says the wind. "There's life's pact--perhaps, too, its probation; but man might at least, as he grasps 'one fair, good, wise thing,'--the love of a loving woman--grave it on his soul's hands' palms to be his for ever."

VII. AMONG THE ROCKS.--Earth sets his bones to bask in the sun, and smiles in the beauty with which the rippling water adorns him; and so she comforts herself by reflecting that we may make the low earth-nature better by suffusing it with our love-tides. Love is gain if we love only what is worth our love. How much more to make the low nature better by our throes!

VIII. BESIDE THE DRAWING-BOARD.--She has been drawing a hand. A clay cast of a perfect thing is before her. She has learned something of the infinite beauty of the human hand--has studied it, has praised God, its Maker, for it; and as she contemplates the world of wonders to be discovered therein, she is fain to efface her work and begin anew, for somehow grace slips from soulless finger-tips. The cast is that of a hand by Leonardo da Vinci. She has passionately longed to copy its perfection, but as the great master could not copy the perfection of the dead hand, so she has failed to draw the cast. And so she turns to the peasant girl model who is by her side that day, "a little girl with the poor coarse hand," and as she contemplates it she begins to understand the worth of flesh and blood, and that there is a great deal more than beauty in a hand. She has read Bell on the human hand, and she knows something of the infinite uses of the mechanism which is hidden beneath the flesh. She knows what use survives the beauty in the peasant hand that spins and bakes. The living woman is better than the dead cast. She has learned the lesson that all this craving for what can never be hers--for the love she cannot gain, any more than the perfection she cannot draw--is wasting her life. She will be up and doing, no longer dreaming and sighing.

IX. ON DECK.--It was better to leave him! She will set him free. She had no beauty, no grace; nothing in her deserved any place in his mind. She was harsh and ill-favoured (and perhaps this was the secret of the trouble). Still, had he loved her, love could and would have made her beautiful. Some day it may be even so; and in the years to come a face, a form--her own--may rise before his mental vision, his eyes be opened, his liberated soul leap forth in a passionate "'Tis she!"

=Jesus Christ.= That Mr. Browning was something more than a Theist, a Unitarian, or a Broad Churchman, may be gathered from several passages in his works, as well as from direct statements to individuals. Three lines in the _Death in the Desert_ (though often said to be used only dramatically), when taken in connection with the whole drift and purpose of the poem, seem to indicate a faith which is more than mere Theism:

"The acknowledgment of God in Christ, accepted by thy reason,
Solves for thee all questions in the earth and out of it,
And has so far advanced thee to be wise."

In the _Epistle of Karshish_, the Arab physician says concerning Jesus, who had raised Lazarus from the dead:--

"The very God! think, Abib, dost thou think?
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too--
So, through the thunder comes a loving voice
Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine.
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!'
The madman saith He said so: it is strange."

_Christmas Eve_ and _Easter Day_ seem to be meaningless if they do not express the author's faith in the divinity of our Lord. Just as every believer in Him can detect the true ring of the Christian believer and lover of his Lord in the lines quoted from the _Epistle of Karshish_, so will his touchstone detect the Christian in many other passages of the poet's work.

In _Saul_, canto xviii., David says:--

"My flesh, that I seek
In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me,
Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever: a Hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!"

David--to whom Christendom attributes the Psalms, even were he only the editor of that wonderful body of prayer and praise--as the utterer of sentiments like these, is permitted to express the orthodox opinion that he prophesied of the Christ who was to come. Mr. Browning would have hardly done this "dramatically." (What are termed "the Messianic Psalms" are ii., xxi., xxii., xlv., lxxii., cx.) Pompilia, in _The Ring and the Book_, a character which is built up of the purest and warmest faith of the poet's heart, says:--

"I never realised God's truth before--
How He grew likest God in being born."

The poem entitled "The Sun," in _Ferishtah's Fancies_, No. 5, may be studied in this connection.

=Jews.= Browning had great sympathy with the Jewish spirit. See RABBI BEN EZRA, JOCHANAN HAKKADOSH, BEN KARSHOOK, HOLY CROSS DAY, and FILIPPO BALDINUCCI.

=Jochanan Hakkadosh.= (_Jocoseria_: 1883.) The Hebrew which Mr. Browning quotes in the tale as the title of the work from which his incidents are derived, may be translated as "Collection of many Fables"; and the second Hebrew phrase means "from Moses to Moses [Moses Maimonides] there was never one like Moses." Although the story of this poem is not historical, it is founded on characters and events which are familiar to students of Jewish literature and history. Hakkadosh means "The Holy." Rabbi Yehudah Hannasi (the Prince) was the reputed author of the _Mishnah_, and was born before the year 140 of the Christian era. On account of his holy living he was surnamed Rabbenu Hakkadosh. Jochanan means John. In the _Jewish Messenger_ for March 4th, 1887, the poem is reviewed from a Jewish point of view by "Mary M. Cohen," from which interesting study we extract the following particulars:--The scene of the poem is laid at Schiphaz, which is probably intended for Sheeraz, in Persia. "I think," says the authoress, "that, with artistic licence, Mr. Browning does not here portray any individual man, but takes the names and characteristics of several rabbis, fusing all into a whole. Jochanan finds old age a continued disappointment. He is represented as almost overtaken by death; his loving scholars, as was usual in the days of rabbinism, cluster about him for some worthy word of parting advice. One of the pupils asks: 'Say, does age acquiesce in vanished youth?' The rabbi, groaning, answers grimly:

"Last as first
The truth speak I--in boyhood who began
Striving to live an angel, and, amerced
For such presumption, die now hardly, man.
What have I proved of life? To live, indeed,
That much I learned."

It was suggested to the dying rabbi that if compassionating folk would render him up a portion of their lives, Hakkadosh might attain his fourscore years. Tsaddik, the scholar, well versed in the Targums, was foremost in urging the adoption of this expedient. By yielding up part of their lives, the pupils of Jochanan hope to combine the lessons of perfect wisdom and varied experience of life. But experience proves fatal to all the hopes, the aspirations, the high ideals of youth. Experience paralyses action. Experience chills the aspirations which animate the generous mind of the lover, the soldier, the poet, the statesman. When the men of experience contributed their quota, 'certain gamesome boys' must needs throw some of theirs also. This accounts for the rabbi being found alive unexpectedly after a long interval:

"Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home."

The rabbi utters heaven-sent intuitions, the gift of these lads. Under the influence of the _Ruach_, or spirit, Jochanan declares that happiness, here and hereafter, is found in acting on the generous impulses, the noble ideals which are sent into the mind, in spite of the testimony of experience that we shall fail to realise our aspirations. 'There is no sin,' says the rabbi, 'except in doubting that the light which lured the unwary into darkness did no wrong, had I but marched on boldly.' What we see here as antitheses, or as complementary truths, are reconciled hereafter. This reconciliation cannot be grasped by our present faculties. The rabbi seems to 'babble' when he tries to express in words the truth he sees. The pure white light of truth, seen through the medium of the flesh, is composed of many coloured rays. Evil is like the dark lines in the spectrum. The whole duty of man is to learn to love. If he fails, it matters not; he has learned the art: 'so much for the attempt--anon performance.' Love is the sum of our spiritual intuitions, the law of our practical conduct."

NOTES.--_Mishna_, the second or oral Jewish law; the great collection of legal decisions by the ancient rabbis; and so the fundamental document of Jewish oral law. _Schiphaz_, an imaginary place; or perhaps _Sheeraz_, on the Bundemeer, referred to at end of poem. _Jochanan Ben Sabbathai_, not historical. _Khubbezleh_, a fanciful name of the poet's invention. _Targum_, a Chaldee version or paraphrase of the Old Testament. _Nine Points of Perfection_: Nine is a trinity of trinities, and is a mystical number of perfection; the slang expression "dressed to the nines" means dressed to perfection. _Tsaddik_ == just, not historical. _Dob_ == Bear (the constellation). _The Bear_, the constellation. _Aish_, the Great Bear. _The Bier_: the Jews called the constellation of the Great Bear "The Bier." _Three Daughters_, the tail stars of the Bear. _Banoth_ == daughters. _The Ten_: Jewish martyrs under the Roman empire. _Akiba_, _Rabbi_, lived A.C. 117, and laid the groundwork of the Mishna. He was one of the greatest Jewish teachers, and was at the height of his popularity when the revolt of the Jews under Barcochab took place. (See for a history of the revolt, and of Akiba's influence, _Milman's History of the Jews_, Book xviii.) He was scraped to death with an iron comb. _Perida_: a Jewish teacher of such infinite patience that the Talmud records that he repeated his lesson to a dull pupil four hundred times, and as even then he could not understand, four hundred times more, on which the spirit declared that four hundred years should be added to his life. _Uzzean_: Job, the most patient man, was of the land of Uz. _Djinn_, a supernatural being. _Edom_: Rome and Christianity went by this name in the Talmud. "_Sic Jesus vult_," so Jesus wills. _The Statist_ == the statesman. _Mizraim_ == Egypt. _Shushan_ == lily. _Tohu-bohu_, void and waste. _Halaphta_, Talmudic teachers. _Ruach_, spirit. _Bendimir_: no doubt the Bundemeer, one of the chief rivers of _Farzistan_, a province in Persia. _Og's thigh bone_: "Og was king of Bashan. The rabbis say that the height of his stature was 23,033 cubits (nearly six miles). He used to drink water from the clouds, and toast fish by holding them before the orb of the sun. He asked Noah to take him into the ark, but Noah would not. When the flood was at its deepest, it did not reach to the knees of this giant. Og lived 3000 years, and then he was slain by the hand of Moses. Moses was himself ten cubits in stature (15 feet), and he took a spear ten cubits long, and threw it ten cubits high, and yet it only reached the heel of Og.... When dead, his body reached as far as the river Nile. Og's mother was Enach, a daughter of Adam. Her fingers were two cubits long (one yard), and on each finger she had two sharp nails. She was devoured by wild beasts.--_Maracci._"

=Jocoseria.= The volume of poems under this title was published in 1883. It contains the following works: "Wanting is--What?" "Donald," "Solomon and Balkis," "Cristina and Monaldeschi," "Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli," "Adam, Lilith and Eve," "Ixion," "Jochanan Hakkadosh," "Never the Time and the Place," "Pambo." In a letter to a friend, along with an early copy of this work, the poet stated that "the title is taken from the work of Melander (Schwartzmann)--reviewed, by a curious coincidence, in the _Blackwood_ of this month. I referred to it in a note to 'Paracelsus.' The two Hebrew quotations (put in to give a grave look to what is mere fun and invention), being translated, amount to: (1) "A Collection of Many Lies"; and (2) an old saying, 'From Moses to Moses arose none like to Moses' (_i.e._ Moses Maimonides)...." One of the notes to _Paracelsus_ refers to Melander's "Jocoseria" as "rubbish." Melander, whose proper name was Otho Schwartzmann, was born in 1571. He published a work called "Joco-Seria," because it was a collection of stories both grave and gay.

=Johannes Agricola in Meditation.= (First published in _The Monthly Repository_, and signed "_Z._," in 1836. Reprinted in _Dramatic Lyrics_, in _Bells and Pomegranates_, 1842.) Johannes Agricola meditates on the thought of his election or choice by the Supreme Being, who in His eternal counsels has before all worlds predestined him as an object of mercy and salvation. God thought of him before He thought of suns or moons, ordained every incident of his life for him, and mapped out its every circumstance. Totally irrespective of his conduct, God having chosen of His own sovereign grace, uninfluenced in the slightest degree by anything which Johannes has done or left undone, to consider him as a guiltless being, is pledged to save him of free mercy. It would make no difference to his ultimate salvation were he to mix all hideous sins in one draught, and drink it to the dregs. Predestined to be saved, nothing that he can do can unsave him; foreordained to heaven, nothing he could do could lead him hell-wards. As a corollary, those souls who are not so predestined in the counsels of God to eternal salvation may be as holy, as perfect, in the sight of men as he (Agricola) might be vile in their sight; yet they shall be tormented for ever in hell, simply because God has mysteriously left them out of His choice. They are reprobate, non-elect, and nothing that they could possibly do could avail to save them. When Adam sinned, he sinned not only for himself, but for the whole human race, and the whole species was forthwith condemned in him, excepting only those whom God in His Sovereign mercy had from all eternity elected to save, and that without regard to their merit or demerit. These reprobate persons might try to win God's favour, might labour with all their might to please Him, and would only thereby add to their sin. Priest, doctor, hermit, monk, martyr, nun, or chorister,--all these, leading holy and before men beautiful lives, were eternally foreordained to be lost before God fashioned star or sun. For all this Johannes Agricola praises God, praises Him all the more that he cannot understand Him or His ways, praises Him especially that he has not to bargain for His love or pay a price for his salvation. Such is the terrible portrait which Mr. Browning has drawn of the teaching of a man who, as one of the Reformers, and as a friend of Luther, was the founder of what is known in religious history as Antinomianism. Hideous as is the perversion of gospel teaching which Agricola set forth, the doctrines of Antinomianism still linger on amongst certain sects of Calvinists in England and Scotland. The doctrine of reprobation is thus stated in the _Westminster Confession of Faith_, iii. 7: "The rest of mankind (_i.e._ all but the elect), God was pleased ... to pass by, and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath, etc." Mosheim, in his _Ecclesiastical History_ (century xvii., Sect. II., Part II., chap, ii., 23), thus describes the Presbyterian Antinomians: "The Antinomians are over-rigid Calvinists, who are thought by the other Presbyterians to abuse Calvin's doctrine of the absolute decrees of God, to the injury of the cause of piety. Some of them ... deny that it is necessary for ministers to exhort Christians to holiness and obedience of the law, because those whom God from all eternity elected to salvation will themselves, and without being admonished and exhorted by any one, by a Divine influence, or the impulse of Almighty grace, perform holy and good deeds; while those who are destined by the Divine decrees to eternal punishment, though admonished and entreated ever so much, will not obey the Divine law, since Divine grace is denied them; and it is therefore sufficient, in preaching to the people, to hold up only the gospel and faith in Jesus Christ. But others merely hold that the elect, because they cannot lose the Divine favour, do not truly commit sin and break the Divine law, although they should go contrary to its precepts and do wicked actions, and therefore it is not necessary that they should confess their sins or grieve for them: that adultery for instance, in one of the elect appears to us indeed to be a sin or a violation of the law, yet it is no sin in the sight of God, because one who is elected to salvation can do nothing displeasing to God and forbidden by the law." Very similar teaching may be discovered at the present day in the body of religionists known as Hyper-Calvinists or Strict Baptists. The professors are for the most part much better than their creed, and they are exceedingly reticent concerning their doctrines so far as they are represented by the term Antinomian; but the organs of their phase of religious belief, _The Gospel Standard_ and _The Earthen Vessel_, frequently contain proofs of the vitality of Agricola's doctrines in their pages. For example, in the _Gospel Standard_ for July 1891, p. 288, we find the following: "No hope, nor salvation, can possibly arise out of the law or covenant of works. Every man's works are sin,--his best works are polluted. Every page of the law unfolds his defects and shortcomings, nor will allow of a few shillings to the pound,--Pay the whole or die the death." The tendency of Antinomianism is to become an esoteric doctrine, and it is seldom preached in any grosser form than this, however sweet it may be to the hearts of the initiated.

=John of Halberstadt.= The ecclesiastic in _Transcendentalism_ who was also a magician and performed the "prestigious feat" of conjuring roses up in winter.

=Joris.= One of the riders in the poem "How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix."

=Jules.= (_Pippa Passes_). The young French artist who married Phene under a misunderstanding, the result of a practical joke played upon him by his companions.

=Karshish.= (_An Epistle._) The Arab physician who wrote of the interesting cases which he had seen in his travels to his brother leech, and who described Lazarus, who was raised from the dead, as having been in a trance.

=King, A.= The song in _Pippa Passes_, beginning "A king lived long ago," was originally published in _The Monthly Repository_ (edited by W. J. Fox) in 1835.

=King Charles I.= of England. See STRAFFORD.

=King Charles Emanuel=, of Savoy (_King Victor and King Charles_), was the son of Victor Amadeus II., Duke of Savoy. He became king when his father suddenly abdicated, in 1730.